Towards a sustainable economic integration: Policy and practice

This explorative study shows that immigrants are as heterogeneous as their needs for services and support. It is not always the case, however, that these measures reflect the heterogeneity of the immigrant population and their needs. Our research objective is to find ways that integration authorities could utilize policies in order for immigrants to benefit from them more than before. We also focus our view on immigrants’ heterogeneity, which is a phenomenon that is not considered as a significant problem, although it is widely recognized that immigrants are from different cultures and backgrounds. However, this is not recognized officially in order to emphasize policies and their implementation. Our research argues that all policies should be approached in a versatile yet pragmatic way. Policies need to be developed to better meet the diverse needs of the varied immigrant groups in Finland. As a result, one integration plan or policy is simply not suitable for all groups of people. The fact that many good policies regarding immigrant integration do not seem to work well in practice demonstrates that we have to implement them more specifically on a case-to-case basis.